When Charnjit “Sonny” Bassi, a 45-year-old father of one, walked into the courthouse in Brampton and shot Const. Mike Klarenbeek, one detail made it easier for police to respond: in Peel Region, sworn officers look after courthouse security, and they carry guns.

Peel police shot Mr. Bassi dead on the spot. Const. Klarenbeek is recovering from his wounds.

The circumstances are different in Toronto, where the people who guard entrances to the city’s 16 courthouses look for all the world like police, but aren’t.

Next time you go to court — where you will be asked to empty your pockets into (or place your purse on) a grey plastic tub, and prepare to walk through the metal detector — take a good look at the people checking your possessions and wielding the metal detector wands. They wear blue police uniforms and bullet-proof vests and black police officer hats. But they do not carry guns. These are Toronto Police Court Officer Special Constables, armed only with walkie-talkies and batons.

It seems paradoxical.

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Police arrest bad guys, many of them for offences involving weapons. Once arrested, the bad guys all have to pass through the court system. Yet we don’t give guns to the officers protecting the courts.

Suppose someone walks into a Toronto courthouse with a gun and starts to shoot, have we given these officers adequate equipment to respond?

Brendan Crawley, a spokesman for Ontario’s attorney-general, said that although the provinces run the courts, under the Police Services Act “court security is the responsibility of the police.”

Soon after a gunman shot Const. Klarenbeek back in late March, Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, met Chief Bill Blair and senior command of Toronto police. Mr. McCormack wanted to talk about the safety of the men and women who protect Toronto’s courts.

“I asked to do a health and safety audit of the courts and see if we need to shore that security up,” Mr. McCormack said Friday.

Courthouse shootings in Ontario are rare. Prior to the mayhem in Brampton, the last shooting dates to 1982, when a man opened fire in Courthouse 4 at Osgoode Hall. The bullets killed Oscar Fonseca, a lawyer, and his client, Bhupinders Singh Pannu.

Two years earlier, in 1980, Toronto police had decided that to save money it would replace police officers with unarmed special constables in the courts. The 1982 shooting did not persuade them to re-arm court officers. Today, the Toronto Police Service employs 750 unarmed special constables in court services. They also handle prisoner transportation.

They process the bad guys, and all without weapons of their own. At Old City Hall, a battered metal box sits on a table just outside the conveyor belt and the X-ray machines. Here accused criminals can drop off any weapons before entering. A sign reads, “All items placed in this box will not be returned and will be destroyed.”

The TPA, the union for Toronto’s police officers, has been known in the past for taking shrill positions to defend the interests of its powerful members. Even so, Mr. McCormack used even-handed language this week when discussing whether to arm the court officers.

“We’ve had a 30-year history without incidents,” notes Mr. McCormack. “We need to look at it from a practicality standpoint. We don’t want to bring out an alarmist position.”

While the police manning security at Toronto courthouses may have no guns, on any given day there are always sworn officers testifying at trials, he notes.

“Those officers are fully armed,” Mr. McCormack says. If trouble breaks out in a courthouse “it is very unlikely that you are not going to have an armed police officer” nearby.

Sgt. Matt Small of Peel Regional Police says that, because the province’s Special Investigations Unit is still probing the March 28 shooting at the Brampton courthouse, “we are not speaking to anything with regards to court security.”

I asked special constables in the College Park courthouse on Friday how they felt that courthouse guards in Peel get guns but they do not. One of them noted “they have guns in Durham, too,” but declined further comment.

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